4 ms·
Reminds me of when the president of a warring nation once won the Nobel Peace Prize.
by alwayshasbeen 5y ago
Reminds me of when the president of a warring nation once won the Nobel Peace Prize.
- iab 5y agoI always think about Richard Feynmans take on awards and honors whenever these things get brought up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fes-kqRDRoY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fes-kqRDRoY
- realsimplesynd 5y agoI wonder if there is a correlation between being super good and having a disdain for awards or not.
- capableweb 5y agoDo you have a disdain for awards?
- iab 5y agoIt’s the only attribute Feynman and I share ;)
- b0afc375b5 5y agoYes, I hate awards. In my own experience, awards have only inflated my ego, and has not led me to become more productive or passionate about the things I excel at. It made me complacent and less likely to go above and beyond at work, possibly because I have the feeling that I've already "reached it", whatever that means.
- xyzzy21 5y agoProbably akin to how if you are truly competent you don't need to oversell yourself. The smartest PhDs I've ever met in Silicon Valley NEVER TOLD ANYONE they had PhDs. The dumbest ones ALWAYS led with "I'm a PhD" or "call me doctor"!
- Igelau 5y agoYou're going to have to be more specific than that :\
- speps 5y agoHe means Obama
- spaetzleesser 5y agoObama’s main achievement at the time he received the Noble was that he wasn’t Bush. Worst peace prize ever.
- sneak 5y agoGP meant this has happened more than once.
- perl4ever 5y agoThe description more or less applies to a lot of recipients, so it could mean Obama, or it could be intentionally a set up for those who think Obama was the only one.
- carabiner 5y agoThey could just rename it the War Prize. Definitely the most controversial of the Nobels: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nobel-prize-peace/war-and-the-prize-how-some-nobel-laureates-turn-away-from-peace-idUSKCN1C225S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nobel-prize-peace/war-and...
- chongli 5y agoNobel himself owned Bofors, a manufacturer of artillery and other weapons of war.
- Blikkentrekker 5y agoHe was given the award for outstanding achievement in “not being George W. Bush”. One is very often compared to one's prædecessors.
- knuthsat 5y agoYeah, then he ended up being a bigger warmonger than Bush. But I believe OP meant other warmongers that got the prize too.
- perl4ever 5y agoI'm not sure if you consider Obama to be unique or are being a bit ironic... You know among the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have been Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yassir Arafat, Jimmy Carter, FW de Klerk...? There is a reason Lê Đức Thọ refused his prize.
- 1_player 5y agoAll of which earned their prize AFTER their political achievements. Obama got his before or just as he was sitting in the Oval Office the first time. How is that not a farce? Because he was the first black president? Give the Nobel prize to the voters then.
- perl4ever 5y ago>All of which earned their prize AFTER their political achievements Rabin and Arafat earned their prize AFTER their achievement of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? "We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. And we are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do," noting that he hoped the award would assist Obama's foreign policy efforts. Jagland said the committee was influenced by a speech Obama gave about Islam in Cairo in June 2009, the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals.[11] The New York Times reported that Jagland shrugged off the question of whether "the committee feared being labeled naïve for accepting a young politician's promises at face value", stating that "no one could deny that 'the international climate' had suddenly improved, and that Mr. Obama was the main reason... We want to embrace the message that he stands for."
- jeofken 5y agoWhat a farce. The piece price is awarded by a committee selected by the political parties of Norways Parlament - for Americans, you can think of this as the Democratic Party in an (almost) mono-ethnic white small 5mil country. Alfred Nobel set it up such because he thought Norwegians would be more peaceful than Swedes. The science and literature prices are given by the (nonpolitical) Swedish royal academy. This is the reason why the peace price is so different from the other prices.